Hugh Mills - Low Level Hell

As we leapt up to the crest of the trees and the OH-6’s nose depressed for the letdown on the other side, I looked forward through the bubble. Spread out across my front from left to right was a string of thirty NVA soldiers in column, walking on the paddy dike, taking their own sweet time.

I was moving very fast and very low, so the sound of my engine and blades was muffled by the vegetation, and my Cobra was high and too far behind me to be seen or heard. The enemy was taken completely by surprise.

When I popped up over that tree line, doing more than a hundred knots and less than thirty to forty yards off their left flank, those poor bastards were thunderstruck.

I could tell as soon as I saw the column that these guys were NVA regulars. Unlike guerrillas, they were loaded down with equipment, such as mortars, SGMs, radios, and web gear. It looked like an NVA heavy weapons platoon. They had probably scouted the open ground ahead, satisfied themselves that there was no potential danger, then started to move the whole platoon across. And at that very instant, up I bounced over the tree line, catching them bare-assed in the open with no cover and no place to run.

Snapping back from my initial shock at seeing a whole column of enemy soldiers strung out across my front, I started to look at them more carefully. My eyes focused on their point man. He was no more than thirty yards in front of me, frozen in place, staring right at me. Then he started to jerk up his weapon.

I hit my radio transmit switch and yelled, “Dinks! Dinks! They’re right under me!” Then I squeezed the minigun trigger to two thousand rounds a minute. My initial blast caught the wide-eyed point man square across his belt line and literally cut him in half.

I kicked hard right pedal, held the bird’s nose down, and spun around in order to bring the minigun to bear on the rest of the column. Squeezing the minigun trigger again—this time all the way back to four thousand rounds per minute—my second burst raked through the next four men. The bullets slammed them to the ground in a cloud of dust, debris, and body parts.

The paddy dike now seemed to explode as the NVA soldiers shot back at me, running every which way trying to find cover. I again broke hard right in order to bring Parker’s M-60 to bear on the maze of trapped enemy in the clearing below.

He ripped off a three- to four-second burst, then keyed his intercom button. “Level out, sir. Level it out!” he yelled at me.

The right turn I was executing was so sharp that Parker couldn’t fire without the risk of hitting the bird’s tilted rotor blades. I slammed the cyclic stick to center, leveling out the aircraft, and instantly heard Parker’s M-60 go to full bore. He had caught a group of three NVA soldiers trying to make it out of the clearing and back to the jungle. He dropped them all in their tracks.

I was pulling the ship around for another circle over the mass of enemy confusion when Three Four’s voice suddenly erupted in my earphones. He was shouting, “One Six, One Six, what the hell’s going on down there? What have you got? What have you got down there, One Six?”

“Dinks… I got dinks, lots of dinks,” I blurted. “We’ve got ‘em trapped. They’re running all over the place!”

I didn’t hear his reply because Parker was going crazy with his 60. Besides, I had just spotted an NVA with an AK-47 rifle running toward the jungle. Another soldier was running in front of him and they were both hell-bent for election.

Determined not to lose them, I pulled the bird hard around to come up on their rear. It was then that I noticed all the shooting that was coming up at us from the ground. There was a constant stream of AK-47 fire, and I could hear rounds beginning to impact the aircraft. But I was still not going to let those two soldiers make it back into the jungle. I pulled up to about forty yards behind them. They knew I was on their tail and they were running for their lives.

As I raced up the trail behind them, I noticed that one of the soldiers had a large black rice cooking pot strapped to the back of his pack. It was the size of a large wash bucket and was bouncing furiously up and down as he ran. I pulled the nose down a little, watching the bottom of the cooking pot come into view through the cross hairs grease-penciled in front of me on the bubble’s Plexiglas. I touched a shade of right pedal, then I pulled off a short minigun burst.

My rounds walked right up the trail behind the last man, then tore into the bottom of the rice pot. The man pitched forward to the ground. So did the soldier running in front of him. My bullets had apparently gone through the last man and hit the soldier in front, killing them both. There were nine enemy down in less than a minute of battle.

I jerked the bird around in a hard right turn to get back over the main group of trapped enemy soldiers. Again, intense ground fire poured up. We offered a pretty choice target at only five to seven feet off the ground, and I could hear bullets ripping and snapping all through the aircraft. I was trying to bring my minigun to bear on Charlie again, and Jimbo’s 60 was firing in long sustained bursts.

Things were so frantic that it took me awhile to realize that Three Four was yelling at me through the headset. “Get out of there, One Six… get the hell out of there and let me in!”

I snapped back to reality. “Roger, Three Four. One Six is out to the west.”

As soon as Paul saw my tail kick up, he was rolling in and firing rockets. I could see his 2.75s impacting the rice paddy and the nearby jungle. The last pair of rockets that he fired into the swarming enemy soldiers in the clearing contained nail fléchettes. From my circling position nearby, I saw the puffs of red dye explode as the nail fléchette canisters blew open and saturated the whole area with thousands of naillike metal spears.

As Three Four broke from his last firing pass and headed back to altitude, I punched my transmit button: “One Six is back in from the east on BDA.” I pulled back into the clearing from the east, made a couple of fast turns over the area, and discovered that there were still plenty of people moving around. They were still shooting at me, and Parker opened up again with his M-60 on everything he saw moving. I could hear more of Charlie’s rounds impacting the aircraft, and I wondered how much more punishment the OH-6 could take.

Coming around again, I engaged two more enemy soldiers with the minigun and knocked them down. Continuing the turn I saw Parker’s rounds splatter up the dust around two more, then slam them both to the ground.

Out of the right corner of my eye, I saw another NVA jump up from the ground and start to run toward the center of the clearing. Just as I was coming around I saw him dive into some bushes. It was a small vegetated spot, out there all by itself—the only piece of cover in the clearing.

I hit the intercom and told Parker, “Shoot into the bushes. An NVA just jumped in there. Spray the bushes… he’s got no place to go. Get ‘im!”

Parker yelled back, “I can’t, sir, I’m out of ammo!”

I could hardly believe it. In several minutes, Jim had gone through thirty-two hundred rounds of M-60 ammo. “OK,” I said, “I’ll pull around and take him with the mini. Hang on!”

I whipped around, zeroed out airspeed, eased the nose down, and squeezed the minigun trigger back all the way to the stick. Nothing happened. It didn’t shoot. All I heard was the gun motor running. I was out of ammo for the minigun.

I punched the intercom again. “I’m dry on the minigun, too, Jimbo. Do me a Willie Pete.”

Parker yanked a dark lime green canister off the bulkhead wire, pulled the pin, and held the grenade outside the aircraft ready to drop on my command.